If you don’t have expectations, there is only surprise.

Because I had not even a single, rational guess as to what was happening, I could not have been surprised as I knew had no precedent to compare it to.

The black ink from the receipt released itself from the paper and seamlessly slithered up my finger. The blue line came up from the other side and they crisscrossed my finger and made their way calmly and confidently over my hand, up my arm, into my sleeve and disappeared.

Like tiny ants or something even smaller, I felt it come up my arm although it wasn’t necessarily on my skin, it was part of my skin or even under my skin. They continued up my shoulder to my neck, above my chin, around my lips, did something of a sharp turn under my nose and up the other side of it.

Although I could no longer see where they were going as they were on my face, or at least it felt like they were, I had to rely on how it felt. They split up around the middle way up near my nose and one side went for one eye and one line went for the other.

I turned my gaze towards the woman to see if she could see what was going on. Not that I had big hopes that she could suddenly explain, in English at that, what was going on. I didn’t bother to ask as, for one, I doubt she could have answered in a language I could have understood, and second, she looked at me in a way that she knew exactly what was going on and that was enough of an explanation for me at this point.

Like water rushing through a gate, the lines broke up and entered both of my eyes. It tickled and I had the urge to blink, but I was now staring at her and she was staring back and I noticed that the yellow of her eyes was glistening and almost bubbling.

It wasn’t a wicked witch of the west bubbling pot, but more of a friendly simmer. I knew this because that’s what it now felt like in my own eyes.

Every few seconds, I wanted to remind myself of how shocking this all was, how out of the ordinary, how no-one-is-going-to-believe-this-because-I-wouldn’t-either this all was. Where was my GoPro when I needed it? Why didn’t I have my phone on record? At least get the audio? Although there wasn’t much to be had. But that was only every few seconds. For the rest of the time, I had my full attention on her eyes and what was possibly happening to my own.

When someone asks you if you’re tense and your first reaction is to say no, try then tightening every muscle in your body and then slowly letting them all loose again. Of course, you then feel more relaxed. You feel every muscle in your body loosening softly and you feel almost like a boneless blob who probably couldn’t stand up. That’s how I felt–without the tensing up part.

There was something coming out of my eyes, but it wasn’t air or pressure or light or something I could feel. I could only explain it like what I think happens when an X-ray turns on. There are waves, but we can’t feel them or see them. This is now what my eyes felt like.

I wanted to see a mirror. I finally turned my head away from hers and looked around the room, but there wasn’t much other than cafe storage supplies. I turned the other way around to check there. Not much in terms of a way that I could see what I looked like.

A thought occurred to me to stop thinking about a solution. It wasn’t the most practical path to a solution, I thought at first, but it was what I felt I should do. Rationale had escaped out the fire exit long ago. I also made a quick note that I wasn’t feeling, ahem, exactly like my regular self at this point. But if I wasn’t feeling like myself, then who was I feeling like?

I knew what to do. I closed my eyes.

A dust settled in my poor, overworked, overloaded brain. It only took a second and I knew what to do. It was the closest I had ever felt to an instinct.

I opened my eyes.

She now had the teardrop eyes but with a pupil of blue. The blue was drawn like an artist might sketch it, seemingly carelessly, but beautifully done. A Picasso. The black encircled the blue and the background was a deep yellow approaching orange. I was wondering how her eyes had changed so much towards what I thought my own eyes might look like when I realized that I was no longer looking at her.